Business organizations are using blogs as a conversational technology to help build a community of practice where knowledge exchange and sharing actively take place. This case study examines how Macromedia used blogs to build its developers' communities and become more organizationally effective. Four major types of interactions between the company employees and customers through the blogs are analyzed: socialization, information sharing, help seeking, and teaching and learning. Organizational factors that contributed to the success of such a strategy are also revealed in the study. A model is thus drawn to explain how blogs contributed to the organization's effectiveness by strengthening customer relations, product development, and innovation. Finally, practical suggestions are provided for companies that are considering adopting a blogging strategy for customer relations, product development, and community-driven innovation.

"Employee resistance has traditionally been analysed as an activity that occurs in the work organisation. In recent years, new Internet communication technologies, such as blogs, have expanded the possibilities for employees to express conflict. This paper explores how these developments can add to our understandings of employee resistance to the labour process."

"Sun Microsystems' CEO challenged his Global Employee Communications team to build communities within the company with social networking technology. Wikis, blogs, Facebook fan pages, and six islands on Second Life are just a few of Sun's new social media tools that employees use to learn, boost innovation, connect with executives and each other - and spread the good word about Sun. To achieve this quickly, the communications team collaborated across organizational boundaries, tapped grassroots social media efforts in other parts of the company, focused on a manageable number of short-term projects, and showed a willingness to experiment."

"Blogging is a dynamic, interactive medium for the communication between authors and readers. In spite of many stories of using blogs in corporate working environment, these stories are largely anecdotal and it is unclear whether this practice actually delivers positive benefits for companies. This study investigates the impact of blogging phenomenon on employees' behaviour in the e-global age and introduces cases to understand how corporations can improve their IT workers' Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) levels through employee blogging."

Long before blogs where widely used, one of the ways of finding research related to owns interest was following the citation of paper about the topic. After finding those trails, you had to go through library catalogs to locate the paper and then try to have access to the full content of the paper. Today, apart from following bloggers in our interest areas (antecipating published works), we can also follow more easily the trails of the production of researchers through their published work, and through them, discover other researchers that have built on their work.

Ex: If you follow one of the papers of Efimova and Grudin on employee blogging in GoogleSchoolar, you can easily discover other authors that used her work and discover more rapidly how to gain access to work that builts upon the paper. As said, following trails is not new. What is new is information behaviours to follow those trails.

Pesquisar outras coisas / Search for other things

Why the name «B2OB»?

When I started this blog about «Barriers and Opportunities to Organizational Blogging» [Barreiras e Oportunidades Organizacionais ao Blogging] I thought it was to big a name so I've shorted for the numbers of initials, hence one B, two O's and another B.

With time this blog became an information space for playing my way around with social tools and musings about organizational blog use, were the challenge is about changing people's attitudes and making them act socially: sharing, contributing and growing the information ecosystem we are part of.

It was part of my dayly life work in a Government Research Lab. Now I'm on a PhD leave and post infrequently, as you may have noticed.

IBSN

B2OB 2003-2009 by Mónica M. Pinheiro [André].This blog reflects my opinions, observations, thoughts and note taking. It started as a way to learn and explore the uses and possibilities of weblogs and other related social software in organizational settings.